All the ads for the new movie Horton Hears a Who (which I’m looking forward too, never mind the Grinches over at Dave’s) has reminded me of a minor problem I have with Horton’s behavior in the original book.

After the Wickersham brothers take the clover they give it to the black-bottomed eagle Vlad Vladikoff, who drops it in a field of clovers (of course I remember the whole book, I handle story time for a seven year old every night, so I’ve only read this book about once a week for the last five years). I’ve always felt that the story should have ended right there… at that point, what good does it do for Horton to search through three million flowers to find the one with the speck? If he’d just well enough alone the Whos would have remained hidden in that field for the rest of their short, tiny lives, never again to be threatened by killjoy kangaroos with beezlenut oil.

(Topic for another post: What the fuck is the kangaroo’s problem? Horton ain’t hurting nobody, but that jackass marsupial just can’t let it go. Is Dr. Seuss a libertarian? Cause everyone in the book but Horton and the Whos sure act like nanny statists engaged in a metaphor for the War on Drugs.)

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Updated periodically, in chronological order.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Heat, Bill Buford
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
Wilco: Learning How to Die, Greg Kot

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(Updated periodically, no particular order)

The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty
Anything by Christopher Moore (no relation)
The Illuminatus Trilogy
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
Spook Country, William Gibson
Parable of the Talents, Octavia E. Butler
Kindred, Octavia E. Butler
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

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You take someone else’s list of authors (in your case, my list) that they own, and replace any authors you don’t read with ones that you do. Here’s Ryan’s list, taken from this post:

Kurt Vonnegut
Stephen King
Isaac Asimov
Robert A. Heinlein
Douglas Adams
Tom Clancy
Greg Bear
Michael Crichton
Orson Scott Card
Nick Hornby

And here’s mine:

Kurt Vonnegut
Neal Stephenson
Isaac Asimov
Dan Simmons
Douglas Adams
Neil Gaiman
Chuck Palahniuk
Mark Z. Danielewski
Orson Scott Card
Nick Hornby

I replaced a bunch of schlocky junk there, didn’t I?

So, take the list, replace the weird guys you’ve never heard of, and post it on your blog.

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I’ve just finished Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. This was recommended to me by Beth, who hasn’t actually read it, but who heard it was good. I was a little iffy on it when I bought it; I’ve never been a fan of the movie version of The Wizard of Oz and I’ve never read the original L. Frank Baum books. Don’t even get me started on The Wiz.

But, that said, the book was actually quite good. I’ve always enjoyed books written from the viewpoint of the under represented antagonist of a classic book. My best example of this is Grendel by John Gardner, based on the bad guy in Beowulf. I’ve even been thinking about doing this for NaNoWriMo. Maybe the Book of Judas or something about the Queen of Hearts from the Alice books.

This was one of those books that drew me right in. It covers a lot of ground: How the Wizard came to power, detailed overviews of the politics of Oz, and how the Wicked Witch of the West, named Elphaba, came to have green skin (her parents were evidently human). Amusingly, the Wicked Witch of the East was born without arms; from the movie, we had no idea what she looked like except she had legs. Plus, Elphaba (her name is drawn from the initials of her creator. L. F. B., get it?) was Glenda’s roommate in college, and they were pretty good friends right up until Elphaba died.

Of course she wasn’t really Wicked, that was basically a rumor spread by the Wizard since she was a freedom fighter, holding back the armies of Oz from taking over the land in which she lives. She really wasn’t even much of a Witch, the only magic she employs regularly is her flying broom, and she’s not even sure that she enchanted it herself. The flying monkeys were developed through genetics that she learned in college and took much trial and error. We quickly learn that nearly everything in the movie was twisted to a Wizardcentric viewpoint, which built the WWotW into a horrible, all-powerful woman.

The whole book was very satisfying. The characters are fully and appeallingly developed, as is the land of Oz, with everything from culture to religion to ethnic tensions written about in great detail. I think everyone that likes good, especially epic, fiction would enjoy it.

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I just picked up the new Neal Stephenson. It’s somewhat a prequel to Cryptonomicon and the first in a series of three books called the Baroque Cycle that will be released over the next six months. It’s got something to do with Isaac Newton and the ancestors of the characters from Cryptonomicon.

No wonder it took Neal so long to write this… it’s over a thousand pages and he’s gonna release two more in the very near future. Damn! If you don’t know what all the fuss is about Stephenson and don’t feel like diving into the epic Cryptonomicon, you can always start with Snow Crash or, my favorites, The Diamond Age and Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller. Or you could read the longest magazine article ever, about a company laying a trans-Pacific fiber optic cable. Sounds boring, but it isn’t, it’s the best article I’ve ever read.

I can’t wait to read it. I’ve only got a few pages left in Wicked, I’ll post about that and then start the new book soon.

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Great, Chief Moose, the dude in charge of the Washington sniper case, has a memoir about it coming out. Did anyone else think that this guy was a bit of a blowhard during the investigation, and that he mishandled parts of it? All that concentrating on the white van/panel truck when the perpetrators’ car went through numerous police checkpoints. And all the complaining about the press and their printing of leaks:

Moose frequently criticizes reporters and news organizations in the book, especially those that reported on leaks from investigators. He says information released about a tarot card left at one shooting scene may have prolonged the spree by cutting off fragile communications with the sniper.

Dammit, dude, if you don’t want reporters printing leaked info, stop the fucking leaks. Fire a couple of leakers, see if others keep talking.

Anyway, another memoir I won’t be reading.

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I forgot to take the book I was reading to the airport on Friday, so I picked up the only book that looked interesting, Moneyball. And it was very interesting, even to me, a guy who doesn’t like baseball (I like going to games, but that’s a social event with easy availability to snacks and beer) or the business pages of the paper. It was a very compelling story with amazing characters and a great underdog (actually, several great underdogs) to cheer for.

The first underdog doesn’t start out as one. Billy Beane was the classic ballplayer. Scouts base their assesment of players on many things, including build, strength, psychological tests, even facial structure, and Beane had it all. Except that their psychological tests couldn’t see that he wouldn’t be able to handle failure, that he’d crack under the pressure. They also couldn’t tell that he’d be a great front-office employee.

He’s one of those rare people that can ignore his own experience and the received wisdom of a hidebound organization when he sees proof that things work differently than anyone thinks. In his case he sees that teams have been overpaying for certain things for years. He didn’t have that luxury, since he worked for the Oakland Athletics, with either the smallest or the second smallest payroll year in and year out.

Mostly they were overpaying for high school players who looked like ballplayers when they didn’t have any proof of actual ability based on past performance, the high school stats are just too skimpy. So Beane decided to draft college players exclusively, and to base his drafting on their stats, not their build and certainly not the bones in their face. He also used different stats than the other executives, putting a premium on a combination of on-base percentage (OBP) and slugging average called on-base plus slugging (OPS). To Beane it didn’t matter if you lead-off guy got a single or a walk, as long as he got on base.

Other teams were also massively overpaying for speed. You have to steal successfully seventy percent of the time to help your team, less than that and the outs cancel out the extra runs. So Beane drafted college players with lots of walks, not much speed, and also a lack of power. He felt that power could be developed as the player matured, but patience at the plate or the ability to get the bat on the ball couldn’t. He certainly would have loved to take speedy, strong guys, but he had to take valuble players no one else wanted.

Many of his ideas were based on the work of Bill James and other sabermatricians who developed new statistical systems to figure out what actually scored runs and what was just window dressing. It turns out that bunts, sacrifice flies, and base stealing were just crutches that managers fell back on because they’d look foolish if they didn’t get that guy from first to second. But they were underestimating the value of outs and overestimating the value of another base. Basically a guy on second rather than first is a slight improvement, but no outs as opposed to one is a huge improvement. So if you have a guy on first, the next batter might as well swing since runners at first and second or third with no outs is obviously extremely valuble, where if he sacrifices you’ll have one runner on and an out you don’t want.

I loved this book, I only wish it had been longer. I can’t wait to read Liar’s Poker now.

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I read this a while ago, but, like most books, I forgot to write about it. So here goes, a day late and a dollar short.

This wasn’t nearly as good as the Potter books that preceded it, but it did contain some interesting elements. First, Harry starts to really come to terms with his own power and sense of martyrdom. Of course, though most of the book he fails to really understand that this is a plot point. Second, most of his friends and enemies understand this much earlier than he does.

The book definitely manages to sustain suspense, I really wanted to keep reading it as it went on to find out what happened. But the ending was a disappointment. It finishes with a lot of talking, fifty pages after the last action. I hate books that fail to folllow the first rule of fiction: show, don’t tell. But I was so interested in what was being told that I barely noticed, except that I knew I’d want to review the book later.

Potter showing his teenagerhood was the most interesting portion, though. He rebels against authority, with the help of his friends (to the point of all of them trying to kill an authority figure). He finds girls confusing and titillating. He’s a normal teenager, except that he doesn’t do any drugs.

If you’ve read all the Potter books, then I recommend this one. Otherwise, start with the earlier books first.

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Ok, so I read a selection of Dan Simmons work because Treacher recommended it. Oooh, I don’t remember, does he want the www there or not? Let me know.

So now I read A Winter Haunting by the same author. Good book. It had me so creeped out I had to start on my Elmore Leonard book one night when it was feeling particurally creepy and I thought there were people in my house. I grabbed the gun, went looking, and found my cat. But like I said, I had to switch subjects when I got back to bed and couldn’t sleep. Now I understand what it takes to creep Stephen King out.

It’s the story of a college professor who moves into the house of a friend that was killed in his childhood. Soon he is haunted by roaming black dogs and neo-nazis that are angry about his involvement in a series of newspaper articles about militia members. This isn’t like Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with Howell Raines, either. Resignation isn’t an option.

Anyway, I highly recommend this one.

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